Leadership skills and managerial skills are often confused as being the same thing. Most leaders make pretty good managers but the opposite may not always be true. An organization can have many great managers, but great leaders are far and few between. A manager is expected to get tasks accomplished within decided timelines by managing the bandwidth of their team and best utilizing their diverse skillsets. However, a great leader accomplishes these things while also being inspirational and constantly focused on the growth and satisfaction of their team. Leaders have an endless zeal about them, that encourages their followers to believe in themselves and achieve milestones which they would have otherwise considered impossible. While some leadership traits and characteristics occur naturally within people, leadership skills can now be honed by learning from the best habits of established leaders through online leadership courses. Here, we elaborate upon some of the noticeable [...]

There are several factors that determine the success or failure of a startup, but one thing that’ll definitely set you up for failure is the lack of a well laid out business plan. While the importance of an elevator pitch has been well documented, it is your detailed business plan that will actually convince an investor to pledge their money into your business venture. Unlike the entrepreneurial hunger and the risk taking attitude that come naturally to people, writing a good business plan is a skill that can be acquired through readily available and well-structured online entrepreneurship courses in India. While designing a business plan, it’s important to remember that it is not just a document to be used for acquiring funds – but an actual framework that’ll help you grow your business irrespective of the source of investment. Brevity and lucidity are two main characteristics of a good business [...]

Exams, because of their sheer ability to determine futures, are given a lot of importance and are also a common source of stress for school children and their parents alike. While the ability of marks and exams to be the absolute quantifier of a kid’s talents is up for debate, their importance in deciding your young one’s career is well established. Exams are the end result and the one chance for a child to showcase whatever they have learned in class, and the gravity of them often makes school kids struggle and not perform up to their potential. However, a few simple tips and the will to do well is all that’s needed to succeed at exams. Here's how: Studying starts now, not tomorrow: We get to the biggest problem with exams right at the beginning – procrastination. The biggest reason why kids are unable to do well at exams [...]

Business Transformation is the new buzzword for business – with every organization looking to redefine its processes and optimize them to improve performance – while focusing upon its data, technology, applications and business in the process. Redefining and implementing new processes, however, is much more complex than it sounds. This is where Enterprise Architects step in. Enterprise Architecture is all about designing and executing business processes using standardized and existing products and technologies. Since business transformation is a comparatively new, yet extremely popular concept – specialists with knowledge and experience in the domain are in high demand. As with most fields requiring high expertise, the quality of Enterprise Architects and the techniques they use vary widely. However, as the field develops, so do standards and frameworks. TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) developed by The Open Group is a step in this direction, and has gained a lot of respect [...]

Big Data and Analytics have been industry buzzwords for long enough for you to have had them come up in a business conversation at least once. While both Gartner and Forrester have mentioned Big Data and Analytics in their lists of technologies that are likely to change how we work, the actual techniques and technologies continue to remain an enigma to most organizations, especially in the small and medium industry sectors. We try to showcase some real-life examples where organizations across sectors are using Analytics to improve everything from end-user experience, to supply chain and financial management. Before we delve into how companies are using Analytics, it would be prudent to spend some time on understanding why Analytics and Business Intelligence are key to business success. The human population is generating close to 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, enough to fill 10 million Blu-Ray discs in a day! [...]

If you’re a business owner, you’ve probably already heard about SEO or Search Engine Optimization. It’s a digital marketing technique that has quietly existed and helped organizations generate high returns while more popular and savvy techniques like SEM, and Social Media Marketing have delivered varied, and at times expensive, results. SEO has been a buzzword for a few years now, but the understanding and knowledge of it continues to be limited. At a very basic level, SEO can be defined as a set of processes that helps improve the visibility of a website or a web page on a web search engine’s organic search results. In layman terms, SEO is everything that is going to help your website appear within the first few search results on a popular search engine like Google. As you may have expected, the first 2 to 3 pages on Google are highly in demand real [...]

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body”, is a popular idiom. It is also the motivation behind most parents wanting to inculcate the habit of reading in their kids. However, in the modern age of distractions galore, it’s easier said than done, and is a common source of pain and complaints among parents and teachers of young kids alike. Whether you’re a prospective parent that already wants future children to become readers, or a frustrated parent trying to make your kids read, we’d like to tell you that with a little ingenuity, honest effort and our tips, you’ll stand a pretty good chance of being able to inculcate this extremely useful hobby in your child. Let’s dive right in: Practice What You Preach: You’re not going to be able to turn your child into a reader by simply wishing it or admonishing her for not reading. [...]

The start of a new year presents a great opportunity to look back at the previous year, evaluate your growth, and take steps to ensure that the next year is better. You may be looking for a job change, or might be finishing your education and looking for your first job. Your ability to find your dream job depends on a number of factors, including your education background and technical skills, your past experience, your soft skills, and more which are in your control and can be worked upon. There are also various external factors, such as the overall economy, job outlook, required industry skill sets, hiring policies, etc. which are not directly in your control. We tell you everything you need to know about the Indian job market in 2017. The Indian Job Market & Top Industries – All the Positive Signals Though the global economy witnessed a slowdown [...]

The end of a calendar year brings along a palpable change in the air, with every person looking to become a new and improved version of themselves by making actionable plans and taking steps in that direction. The need to improve your overall sense of being involves steps that improve your health and lifestyle, as well as a plan to grow professionally. Your career is something you’re never really satisfied with, and want to continuously enhance. So irrespective of the fact whether you had a great 2016 career-wise or not, we give you some tips to make 2017 an even better year for you! Start by Looking Back: As the year comes to a close, everyone is looking to forget everything that happened in the previous year and make a fresh start, but it’s very important to review the year gone by to be able to set better and achievable [...]

A business, especially a new one, is built around the entrepreneur. Unlike a CEO, who takes care of the overall business activities, entrepreneurs need to deep dive and take control of every department and activity in the business until they grow to a certain size and become capable of having team leaders for various functions. For a new business, marketing, media and PR are key functions. It’s unlikely that a new business will begin with a huge marketing budget, therefore it must try to sell itself by exciting prospects through unconventional routes on parameters such as product benefits, features, etc. This is where the business’ founders come in. They must take control of marketing and work towards media and PR aggressively to get their business noticed and talked about. While you could also go with hiring a PR agency or a dedicated marketing team for this initiative, we tell you [...]